Occam's Razor's Edge is an attempt to make sense of a world gone mad. I do not strive to leave a perfect world only one better than I found.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

If you have never been to the fine website Peace Takes Courage I highly recommend you do so. I have enjoyed that website a great deal. It features a great many animations set to music, most of which oppose the war in Iraq. I was unaware until today that the website is run by a fifteen-year-old girl named Ava Lowery.

Ava must be a fairly impressive girl to do such moving work. Also to be so intelligently against the war at such a young age is mighty impressive. One of her more recent creations, entitled “WWJD” (“What Would Jesus Do?”) shows images of wounded Iraqi children with the voice of small child singing a song “Jesus loves me, this I know”. It ends with quotes from the Beatitudes. Imagine that in our so-called Christian nation someone quoting Jesus’ keynote address The Sermon on the Mount. The “WWJD” animation is rather poignant and worthy of your time as are the rest of her animations. I particularly recommend the one titled “Someone’s”.

Ava isn’t getting all praise and love and heaped on her however. She has been threatened. Go read about it here. Not that this surprises me. All the “pathetic flag-waving ignorant geeks” (Thank you System of a Down) get all irate when someone dares challenge the zeitgeist.

I wish I didn’t have to do this, but I feel I must. I want you all to remember that one of the truly great things about the United States of America is that all opinions are free to expressed. It matters not if you’re a Democrat or a Republican or a Libertarian or a Socialist or a Communist or an Anarchist. All opinions are free to be expressed. If you disagree then I suggest you try and prove them wrong. To threaten or use insults to prove your point, especially directed at a fifteen-year-old girl, shows you haven’t the slight idea what you are talking about.

Benjamin Franklin once said, “Force shites upon the back of reason” or in it’s more G rated version “Might makes right”. I get the feeling that Franklin was pointing out a chink in our armor as opposed to condoning that awful behavior.

This is one of the reason I usually ignore those talking head political shows. Every attempt at a debate degenerates into talking points or platitudes or ad hominem attacks. Who cares? We see or hear so little substantive debate that I’m not sure a lot of people would recognize it if it did happen. If the Lincoln-Douglas debates occurred today they would probably be to dry for CNN or Fox News and thus relegated to the 6 AM slot on C-SPAN.

“The highest treason in the USA is to say Americans are not loved, no matter where they are, no matter what they are doing there.”